Azure Shoreline
by Zappanale
Summary: The exploits of a violent teenager by the name of Victor Falta from a small wastes town who joins up with a group of savage raiders who are systemically robbing and slaughtering entire towns and encampents. Set during the Fallout 1 era. Please R
1. Birth

_"And the answer," said The Judge. "If God meant to interfere in the degenerancy of mankind would he not of done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and to die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of his achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages. do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."_

Excerpt taken from **_Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West_**, by **_Cormac McCarthy_**

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**Author's Note:** Well, it's been a while since I've posted on This story was inspired by the book quoted above and will likely contain quite a bit of violence, as it concerns the exploits of raiders and their savagery. It might be long, or short, it really depends. I'll probably only be updating on weekends because I'm busy Monday through Friday.

The story takes place during the period of time in which the computer game **_Fallout Tactics_** is set, so there will be vehicles and a few towns of my own designs. It may continue up until the era of **_Fallout 2_**. If anybody knows a lot about Fallout's chronology, please drop a review and** let me know if I've made a mistake.** I would also appreciate any information on location: what state most of the Fallout cities are in, how many there are, stuff like that.

Well, onto the story, I suppose. Please **read and review** and hope you enjoy!

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A whole town made of slums. The houses were dirty white, fashioned out of clay and adobe, with little square windows and little wooden doors getting loose at the hinges. There was a police station/jail with iron bars, a small town hall riddled with old bullet holes, a hospital that smelled of the dying.

There was a wooden arch over the barren road that led into town. On it's marquee was the clumsily painted name of the town, "El Topo". A fat lazy man in jeans and a rawhide vest, clutching a shotgun, was standing in a small guard post beside the arch. He wasn't paid for his job. He did it because of raiders.

In one of the houses a child was being born. The parents--a schoolteacher and his dishrag of a wife--were panicking because neither knew how to deliver a baby. The woman was lying on a rug, breathing roughly and screaming. Neighbors paid no attention. They were too concerned with their own matters, like finding enough money for food or finding a way out of that horrible godforsaken town.

The woman screamed. The man--his name was Percival --remembered something he'd read in a medical journal and said, "Push! Push it out!"

She screamed. She accused God of hate. Percival gritted his teeth and knelt before her displayed womanhood and for the next thirty minutes tried to calm her down, to make her push.

When the baby came there was blood with it and after an hour the woman was dead. Percival cradled the filthy child in a blanket. He looked at the corpse of his wife and considered calling the police, but in the end he took it outside into their small backyard with a spade and dug a makeshift grave and dumped her in.

The gravedigging took him two hours and when he returned to the house the baby was crying, bawling as babies do. Percival looked at that baby and was struck with the realization that he'd created a life. The thought depressed him. What good was life in this hell? All that child could look forward to was a life of painful work, hiding, fighting, being constantly afraid of radiation and death at the hands of a savage or a monster.

The child deserved better. Humanity deserved better. Didn't it? They'd caused all this agony themselves through petty squabbles. It could all be likened to a high school brawl: fists flying everything, curses. And then one kid pulls a gun and everybody else pulls a gun and all hell breaks loose, and in the end everybody is wounded and crying and broken. It was a fitting analogy. Nations were but children in the schoolyard of the world, and they were all about as like-minded.

Percival picked the baby up, cradled it in a blanket. There was brahmin milk in the refrigerator. He took some out and clumsily fed the child.

He said, "Your name is Victor Falta." The baby looked up at him with dull eyes. Percival felt a impotent rage then at that child: you killed my wife, she died because of _you_, your existence will ruin my life.

The rage came and went. His wife's corpse decomposed. Victor steadily grew, his father becoming less and less of a presence in his life, spending more time at the school and more time drunk every day.

Victor grew. He, like nearly all other children in that town and in that era of the world, began to develop a taste for mindless violence.

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**Author's Note:** Hope you enjoyed it! Please read and review! Next chapter should come on Sunday or later.


	2. Childhood in El Topo

**Author's Note: **I have high hopes for this story! Who knows, I might even _finish_ this one. While writing this I might also be putting out a Max Payne or a Hitman story as well, so keep a watch out for that, if you're interested.

I'd like to point out, also, that this story takes place in a sort of Fallout 1, 2, and Fallout Tactics hybrid universe. The deathclaws cannot talk, there _are_ vehicles, the Brotherhood of Steel is as it appears in Fallout 1 and 2, and the towns are mostly made up or either from Fallout 1. The timespan may continue into Fallout 2, if I can my chronology straight.

Everything else, I suppose, has been said...so on to the story! Please read and review, yadda yadda, enjoy!

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_He can neither read nor write in him broods already a liking of violence. All humanity present in that visage, the child the father of the man._

Excerpt from **_Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West_**, by **_Cormac McCarthy_**

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He grew up slowly and without the help of his father. Percival Falta, not long after Victor was born, delved into his books and into his Rotgut and stayed there. Victor hardly ever spoke to him and when he did the older man's words were slurred and nonsensical. Things like, "Your face is porcelain white. Too pale. Ahab would hunt you."

Victoe's appearance was disheveled: unclean black hair and big grey eyes and a sharp face with high cheekbones. His jaw had no cleft. As a child the face was naive and often morbid but as he grew into a teenager it became angry. His father made little money working as a teacher and as a result the both of them were often dressed in raggedy clothes: torn trousers, shirts almost black with soot or grey with dust.

Victor went to school only when he felt like it and often did nothing. The teachers paid little attention to him; about as much as his father did. He fought with other children a lot. He had no friends and solved most of his problems with his fists or a length of pipe. He wasn't a bad fighter. His body was thin but his muscles were tight and he had big hands, big knuckles on wide palms and wrists.

He idolized killers. They'd come into town on strange mutant animals from far away corners of the world, men of all shapes and colors and sizes, men with metal armour and giant pistols at their wastes. They sold weapons, food, bought clothes and booze with stolen money. Once one of those men, a caravan guard with greying hair and no left eye, gave Victor a Deathclaw's tooth. Victor kept it in a small box in his house for years afterward.

He learned how to read and write over the course of two or three years, partly from teachers and partly by himself. The first book he read was an old copy of Romeo and Juliet that his father owned and the second was the bible. He liked the bible more because there was more action in it.

At the age of ten he learned how to cook meat from a woman neighbor. Years later he would rob her house.

At twelve he got a job at the local tavern and was fired for stealing money and selling stolen alcohol to drunks for halved prices.

At thirteen he was arrested for fighting in a restaurant with another boy who'd called his father a drunk loser. He spent seven days in jail, alone. The sheriff beat him up and knocked out a tooth.

At fifteen he lost his virginity to a prostitute. She came to him a week later and said she was pregnant. Victor asked, "How's that my business?" She cried and left him there in his doorway.

At sixteen he collected some belongings--food, canteen water, money saved up from his tavern job, Rotgut stolen from his father, a knife--and ran away from home. His father would kill himself upon learning this with a 10mm. Victor traveled at night and spent the day sleeping, in ditches and behind dunes and in abandoned buildings he'd find here and there.

It was at sixteen years old, in the year of 2180, that Victor Falta began his journey into the wastes.

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**Author's Note: **Should be some action next chapter! 


End file.
